The last version of this models provides a bunch of “meta” Dpkg parameters. These parameters are used to customize the behavior of the Dpkg editor tool to suit your needs (For more details, see Config::Model::models::Debian::Dpkg::Meta). The dependency meta parameters will enable you to tune the behavior of config-edit to your needs.

There are 3 dependency parameters, from the most global to the most specific ones:

dependency-filter: your personal general policy

group-dependency-filter: the policy of the maintainer group of your package

package-dependency-filter: filter policy specified per package

Before applying a cleanup, config-edit will check the policies in the above order. The most specific one will be applied. Ie. the group policy will supersede your personal policy and the package specific policy will override the group policy.

Here’s a screenshot of config-edit GUI invoked on a package:

From the parameters set in the GUI above, you can see that a warning will be raised for :

perl package with versioned dependencies older or equals than lenny

any other package with versioned dependencies older or equals than etch

Last but not least, if you want to use config-edit without any dependency filtering, just make sure that all these filter parameters are empty. You will still benefits from other features, like warning if a package dependency is unknown, which is useful to catch typos.

On the packager side, there’s some benefit. For instance, debian-perl team has a policy to remove old versioned dependencies. When packaging modules, I often forgot to remove unnecessary versioned dependencies. So I’ve added this feature to Dpkg model to take care of this for me. That’s one less detail for me to worry about when packaging.